How to convert a website into an Android app from scratch

In this tutorial, we will learn How to Convert a Website into an Android Application using Android Studio.

If you do not know anything about Android Studio yet, Don’t worry.
We will start everything from scratch.

This is how the website looks like:

And the Android app, we developed using Android Studio looks like:

Before we begin:

NOTE: If you downloaded Android Studio and already installed in your system then you can skip the part and Go to direct the coding part.

If not
Download Android Studio:

Google provides Android Studio for the Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux platforms. You can download this software from the Android Studio homepage.

Before downloading Android Studio, make sure your platform meets one of the following requirements:
Windows OS
Microsoft Windows 7/8/10 (32-bit or 64-bit)
2 GB RAM minimum, 8 GB RAM recommended
2 GB of available disk space minimum, 4 GB Recommended (500 MB for IDE + 1.5 GB for Android SDK and emulator system image)
1280 x 800 minimum screen resolution
For accelerated emulator: 64-bit operating system and Intel processor with support for Intel VT-x, Intel EM64T (Intel 64), and Execute Disable (XD) Bit functionality

Mac OS
Mac OS X 10.8.5 or higher, up to 10.11.4 (El Capitan)
2 GB RAM minimum, 8 GB RAM recommended
2 GB of available disk space minimum, 4 GB Recommended (500 MB for IDE + 1.5 GB for Android SDK and emulator system image)
1280 x 800 minimum screen resolution
JDK 6

Linux OS
GNOME or KDE desktop: Tested on Ubuntu 12.04, Precise Pangolin (64-bit distribution capable of running 32-bit applications)
64-bit distribution capable of running 32-bit applications
GNU C Library (glibc) 2.11 or later
2 GB RAM minimum, 8 GB RAM recommended
2 GB of available disk space minimum, 4 GB Recommended (500 MB for IDE + 1.5 GB for Android SDK and emulator system image)
1280 x 800 minimum screen resolution
JDK 8
For accelerated emulator: Intel processor with support for Intel VT-x, Intel EM64T (Intel 64), and Execute Disable (XD) Bit functionality, or AMD processor with support for AMD Virtualization (AMD-V)

Installing Android Studio on 64-bit Windows 8.1

Figure 2. Do you want to install the Android SDK and AVD?

Figure 3. Accept the license agreement to continue the installation

Figure 4. Set the Android Studio and Android SDK installation locations

Figure 5. Create a new shortcut for Android Studio

To complete your installation, leave the Start Android Studio box checked and click Finish.

Figure 6. Leave the Start Android Studio checkbox checked to run this software

Running Android Studio

Android Studio presents a splash screen when it starts running:

If you’re like me and don’t have a previously installed version, you can just keep the default setting and click OK.

Figure 9. Validate your Android SDK and development environment setup

When you click Next, the setup wizard invites you to select an installation type for your SDK components. For now, I recommend you keep the default standard setting.

The wizard will download and unzip various components. Click Show Details if you want to see more information about the archives being downloaded and their contents.

Figure 12. The wizard downloads and unzips Android Studio components

Your options are to either put up with the slow emulator or use an Android device to speed up development. I’ll discuss the latter option later in the tutorial.

Finally, click Finish to complete the wizard. You should see the Welcome to Android Studio dialog box:

You’ve installed and configured Android Studio and created a project for your first Android Studio mobile app; now you’re ready to build your Android application. In Android Studio, this means populating your new project with Java source code and resource files.

Your first Android Studio mobile app

Starting a new project

From our setup so far, you should still have Android Studio running with the Welcome to Android Studio dialog box. From here, click Start a new Android Studio project. Android Studio will respond with the Create New Project dialog box shown in Figure.

Figure 16. Select your target device categories

Click Next, and you will be given the opportunity to choose a template for your app’s main activity. For now, we’ll stick with Empty Activity. Select this template and click Next.

Next, you’ll customize the activity:

Enter W2A as the activity name and main as the layout name, and click Finish to complete this step. Android Studio will respond that it is creating the project, then take you to the project workspace.

The project window is organized into a tree whose main branches are App and Gradle Scripts. The App branch is further organized into manifests, java, and res subbranches:

manifests stores AndroidManifest.xml, which is an XML file that describes the structure of an Android app. This file also records permission settings (where applicable) and other details about the app.
java stores an app’s Java source files according to a package hierarchy, which is ca.javajeff.w2a in this example.
res stores an app’s resource files, which are organized into drawable, layout, mipmap, and values subbranches:
drawable: an initially empty location in which to store an app’s artwork
layout: a location containing an app’s layout files; initially, main.xml(the main activity’s layout file) is stored here
mipmap: a location containing various ic_launcher.png files that store launcher screen icons of different resolutions
values: a location containing colors.xml, dimens.xml, strings.xml, and styles.xml

The Gradle Scripts branch identifies various .gradle (such as build.gradle) and .properties (such as local.properties) files that are used by the Gradle-based build system.

Now the coding part will start…

Add a webView to your activity as shown in the picture below.

layout/activity_main.xml

RelativeLayout xmlns:android=”http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
xmlns:tools=”http://schemas.android.com/tools" android:layout_width=”match_parent”
android:layout_height=”match_parent”
tools:context=”.MainActivity”

WebView
android:layout_width=”fill_parent”
android:layout_height=”fill_parent”
android:id=”@+id/webView”
android:layout_alignParentLeft=”true”
android:layout_alignParentStart=”true”
android:layout_alignParentTop=”true”
android:layout_alignParentRight=”true”
android:layout_alignParentEnd=”true” /

/RelativeLayout
src/main/AndroidManifest.xml
?xml version=”1.0" encoding=”utf-8"?
manifest xmlns:android=”http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" package=”com.vinaysomawat.careerhigh”
android:installLocation=”auto”
uses-permission android:name=”android.permission.INTERNET”/
application
android:allowBackup=”true”
android:icon=”@mipmap/faviconcircular”
android:label=”@string/app_name”
android:roundIcon=”@mipmap/faviconcircular”
android:supportsRtl=”true”
android:theme=”@style/AppTheme”

activity android:name=”.SplashActivity” android:theme=”@style/SplashTheme”
intent-filter
action android:name=”android.intent.action.MAIN” /
category android:name=”android.intent.category.LAUNCHER” /
/intent-filter
/activity
activity android:name=”.MainActivity” /
/application
/manifest

MainActivity.java

package com.vinaysomawat.careerhigh;
/**
 * Created by Vinay Somawat on 10-01-2019.
 */

import android.support.v7.app.ActionBarActivity;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.view.Menu;
import android.view.MenuItem;
import android.webkit.WebSettings;
import android.webkit.WebView;
import android.webkit.WebViewClient;

public class MainActivity extends ActionBarActivity {
private WebView mywebview;

@Override
protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
setContentView(R.layout.activity_main);
mywebview = (WebView)findViewById(R.id.webView);
WebSettings webSettings = mywebview.getSettings();
webSettings.setJavaScriptEnabled(true);
mywebview.loadUrl(“https://careerhigh.in");
mywebview.setWebViewClient(new WebViewClient());
}

@Override
public void onBackPressed(){
if(mywebview.canGoBack()) {
mywebview.goBack();
} else
{
super.onBackPressed();
}
}

@Override
public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu){
getMenuInflater().inflate(R.menu.menu_main, menu);
return true;
}

@Override
public boolean onOptionsItemSelected(MenuItem item){
int id = item.getItemId();
if(id == R.id.action_settings){
return true;
}
return super.onOptionsItemSelected(item);
}
}

menu/menu_main.xml

menu xmlns:android=”http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
xmlns:app=”http://schemas.android.com/apk/res-auto"
xmlns:tools=”http://schemas.android.com/tools" tools:context=”.MainActivity”
item android:id=”@+id/action_settings” android:title=”@string/action_settings”
android:orderInCategory=”100" app:showAsAction=”never” /
/menu

values/styles.xml

resources

    !-- Base application theme. --
    style name="AppTheme" parent="Theme.AppCompat.Light"
        !-- Customize your theme here. --
        item name="colorPrimary"@color/colorPrimary/item
        item name="colorPrimaryDark"@color/colorPrimaryDark/item
        item name="colorAccent"@color/colorAccent/item
    /style
    style name="TextAppearance.AppCompat.Widget.ActionBar.Title" parent="android:TextAppearance"
        item name="android:textColor"@color/titlecolour/item
        item name="android:textSize"30sp/item
    /style

/resources

values/strings.xml

?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?
resources

    string name="app_name"CareerHigh/string
    string name="hello_world"Hello world!/string
    string name="action_settings"Settings/string

/resources

values/colors.xml

?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?
resources
    color name="colorPrimary"#000000/color
    color name="colorPrimaryDark"#303F9F/color
    color name="colorAccent"#FF4081/color
    color name="titlecolour"#398bb7/color
/resources

Add a launching activity to App: (It looks nice)

SplashActivity.java

package com.vinaysomawat.careerhigh;

/**
 * Created by Vinay Somawat on 10-01-2019.
 */
import android.content.Intent;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.support.annotation.Nullable;
import android.support.v7.app.AppCompatActivity;


public class SplashActivity extends AppCompatActivity {

    @Override
    protected void onCreate(@Nullable Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        Intent intent = new Intent(this, MainActivity.class);
        startActivity(intent);
        finish();
    }
}

And add some code it values/styles.xml

style name="SplashTheme" parent="Theme.AppCompat.NoActionBar"
    item name="android:windowBackground"@drawable/background/item
/style

create a drawable/background.xml file:

?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?
layer-list xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    item android:drawable="@color/colorPrimary" /

    item
        bitmap android:src="@drawable/logo2"
            android:gravity="center" /

    /item
/layer-list

make sure you add a sample image to drawable folder to display in launching activity.

OUTPUT:

Now run your android app, and you will see the following result

Finally, your first Android App is created.

If you got stuck somewhere

Download the Source Code

Or use the following command:

command-line

git clone https://github.com/vinaysomawat/CareerHigh-App

And share your Android App with your friends.

Did I get something wrong? Mention it in the comments. I would love to improve.
If you learned even a thing or two, clap your hands ? as many times as you can to show your support!
Hello World, I am Vinay Somawat. A creative developer and a logical designer. You can find me on Linkedin or stalk me on GitHub or maybe follow me on Twitter? If that’s too social for you, just drop a mail to vinaysomawat40@gmail.com if you wish to talk tech with me.

Have a nice day!

Michael D J Paccione